EECH users will be instantly familiar with the EE2 menus and setup options. The format of the individual screens has changed a bit, and the graphics have been changed, but the substance is still essentially the same with settings for controls, graphics, sound, and realism among others.
In a curious twist EE2 has gone it bit backward on the control settings page since all of the controller values are truncated so it is very likely that you’ll have to go back and forth into the game and back to the setting menu multiple times before you actually get your controls responding to the correct inputs. My suggestion is that once you get the control assignments figured out for your particular hardware write down the truncated entries so that you can more quickly assign them if you lose them. There were times where a crash to desktop (CTD) resulted in the entries being wiped out when the game was reloaded. Here is a comparison between the more user friendly EECH controller screen (all future references to EECH in this article means the “modded” EECH) and EE2.
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Also, for comparative purposes here are the hard drive footprints for EECH (again, with tons of texture packs and theaters added) and EE2. You can see EECH weighs in at 2.5 GB while EE2 installs at about 2 GB.
I’ll admit I was impatient to get in and get flying, so I quickly setup my graphics options with high end settings and jumped into a Free Flight scenario just to check out the graphics. EE2 is definitely an improvement (visually) over all previous versions with a few important caveats we will get to later. The textures are rich and detailed, the colors are vivid, and the sky pattern is nicely done.
